Sunday, January 1, 2012

Borges, my last of '11, my first of '12. "Someone," a poem

It seems the right thing, to remember the last poem I read in 2011, and to make it my first in 2012. It's from one of my bedside collections the past few months, Poems of the Night, a selection from three of Borges' books.

"Someone" ("Alguien" in Spanish) is from A Gift of Blindness, 1958-1977.

Like someone, I live with "reasons more terrible than a tiger." Please note and admire how Jorge Luis Borges defines our crouched fears as impossibly muscular.

This morning I jimmied a flyer for an Occupy Language event that will be held on January 26, 5-7:30, at the Bowery Poetry Club, and in hunting for a quote looked no further than James Baldwin. Every
legend, moreover, contains its residium of truth, and the root
function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

"...to control..." the universe seems too colonial, but "describing it," is just the ticket, a ticket I buy. Borges describes.

Someone

A
man worn down by time,

a
man who does not even expect death

(the
proofs of death are statistics

and
everyone runs the risk

of
being the first immortal),

a
man who has learned to express thanks

for
the days' modest alms:

sleep,
routine, the taste of water,

an
unsuspected etymology,

a
Latin or Saxon verse,

the
memory of a woman who left him

thirty
years ago now

whom
he can call to mind without bitterness,

a
man who is aware that the present

is
both future and oblivion,

a
man who has betrayed

and
has been betrayed,

may
feel suddenly, when crossing the street,

a
mysterious happiness

not
coming from the side of hope

but
from an ancient innocence,

from
his own roots or from some diffused god.

He
knows better than to look at it closely,

for
there are reasons more terrible than tigers

which
will prove to him

that
wretchedness is his duty,

but
he accepts humbly

this
felicity, this glimmer.____________Jorge Luis Borges, A Gift of Blindness, 1958-1977, inPoems of the Night, Penguin, 2010. (Many translators are listed.)